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Lost Generation

LOST GENERATION


World War I, originally called the Great War, resulted in more than nine million deaths.
The Great War became a war of attrition due to the use of trench warfare, in which both sides dug elaborate trenches where they could shelter from the enemy's artillery fire. Such a charge usually would gain a side only a small stretch of land, if any, and would result in many deaths. Chemical attacks had not yet been banned; Wilfred Owen's poem 'Dulce et Decorum Est' describes the experience of facing a gas attack.

In the aftermath of the war there arose a group of young persons known as the "Lost Generation." The term was coined from something Gertrude Stein witnessed the owner of a garage saying to his young employee, which Hemingway later used as an epigraph to his novel The Sun Also Rises (1926): "You are all a lost generation." This accusation referred to the lack of purpose or drive resulting from the horrific disillusionment felt by those who grew up and lived through the war, and were then in their twenties and thirties. Having seen pointless death on such a huge scale, many lost faith in traditional values like courage, patriotism, and masculinity. Some in turn became aimless, reckless, and focused on material wealth, unable to believe in abstract ideals.
The members of the Lost Generation were born at the turn of the 20th century, when the world was changing at a rapid pace.
With the competition for jobs and ever-increasing class distinction, the members of the Lost Generation became independent and self-sufficient, not looking to their elders for guidance.
World War I had a tremendous influence on this generation. It lasted many years, and by the time it had ended, millions of men had been affected by the horrors of battle, losing a sense of the values their parents had instilled in them. War had forced this generation to grow up quickly, and for those who'd spent years in the trenches, war was all that they really knew.
In fact, this generation became skeptical of all authority, especially now that their parents were pushing for Prohibition. After the war, the Lost Generation started exploring its own set of values, ones that clearly went against what their elders had already established. Through its rebellion, the Lost Generation came up with its own social mores that gave rise to the Roaring '20s, with its gangsters, speakeasies and hedonism.
Members of the Lost Generation were also nomadic.

In literature, the "Lost Generation" refers to a group of writers and poets who were men and women of this period. All were American, but several members emigrated to Europe. The most famous members were Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and T. S. Eliot.
Ernest Hemingway, who helped popularize the term "Lost Generation" in his novel "The Sun Also Rises," was one of the leaders of this group of expatriates who fled to Paris. Much like he and his contemporaries, Hemingway's protagonists tended to be honest men who lost hope and faith in modern society.

Common themes in works of literature by members of the Lost Generation include:

Decadence - Consider the lavish parties of James Gatsby in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby or those thrown by the characters in his Tales of the Jazz Age. Recall the aimless traveling, drinking, and parties of the circles of expatriates in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast.
Gender roles and Impotence - Faced with the destruction of the chivalric notions of warfare as a glamorous calling for a young man, a serious blow was dealt to traditional gender roles and images of masculinity.

Idealised past - Rather than face the horrors of warfare, many worked to create an idealised but unattainable image of the past, a glossy image with no bearing in reality. The best example is in Gatsby's idealisation of Daisy, his inability to see her as she truly is, and the closing lines to the novel after all its death and disappointment:
"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eludes us then, but that's no matter- to-morrow we will run faster, stretch our arms farther... And one fine morning--
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

The most celebrated literary works of the group: 

  • Bruce Barton: ”Creed of an Advertising Man”
  • Raymond Chandler: “The Big Sleep”
  • Malcolm Cowley: “The View from Eighty”
  • T. S. Eliot:”The Waste Land “
  • Ernest Hemingway: “The Sun Also Rises”
  • William Faulkner:“The Sound and the Fury”
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald: “ The Great Gatsby”
  • Dashiell Hammett: “The Maltese Falcon”
  • Sinclair Lewis “Babbitt”
  • Erich Maria Remarque: “All Quiet on the Western Front”
  • Hart Crane: “The Bridge”
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